"In late August we started asking our readers for any questions they had for NVIDIA about Linux and this graphics company's support of open-source operating systems. Twelve pages worth of questions were accumulated and we finally have the answers to a majority of them. NVIDIA's Andy Ritger, who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team for workstation, desktop, and notebook GPUs, answered these questions. With that said, there are some great, in-depth technical answers and not the usual marketing speak found in many interviews."

Even two years ago I would not have bought anything but nVidia graphics hardware just because their drivers where the best there was. Now, things look totally different. nVidia is quickly moving from 1st place to last place. Intel already rules the integrated graphics sector with their surpreme drivers and AMD is quickly closing the gap, supporting more and more stuff in their free driver every month or so. Even nouveau is getting usable (for 2D stuff, with 3D soon to follow) and it actually already works better than nVidia's binary-only driver for what it can do.

And here we see nVidia not releasing code or docs because they are worried about their precious IP...

intel: Intel drivers are not high quality. Look at all the people bitching about intel performance in Ubuntu 9.04. When that's fixed, you're still going to be left with hardware that can barely run a 3d app. For people who just want compiz that's fine, but for anything else, intel is not an option.

ati: I realize they've released a bunch of documentation. Their drivers still suck though (and I'm including both the open source drivers and the binary ones). Maybe, just maybe if one of the developers working on the ati open source drivers has your exact card you'll get "okay" 2d performance.

I am not sure how to take this comment about these "supreme drivers" that during the past few years have caused more trouble than any other open source driver, in any context, in any open source operating system.

The reasons why they rule the integrated graphics sectors can be found in such things as cheap -- and arguably low-quality -- chips, volume sales, bundling with other Intel hardware, and so on, but certainly not from their drivers for Windows and even less so from their drivers for X.Org.